


stolen, unstolen

by fadewords



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: (and there prolly will not be caps bc as ever i'm too dang lazy for that), (i promise u there's paragraph breaks though. i promise), (i'm not That uncivilized), (motherfuck i knew i still forgot one), (neurodivergents? in MY waverider?? it's more likely than u think), ADHD Jefferson Jackson, ADHD Leonard Snart, ADHD Nate Heywood, ADHD Wally West, Ableism, Autistic Martin Stein, Autistic Mick Rory, Autistic Ray Palmer, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Self-Harm, and some uhhh, anyway uhhhh enjoy!!, lots n lots of goddamn stimming, o shit i almos forgot, some found family vibes but not an actual Primary focus on found family, there we go, this fic is nearly 10k words of basically Only Stimming, u hav been warned, yea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 14:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14750648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadewords/pseuds/fadewords
Summary: it isn't, mick thinks, that he doesn't like stim toys, or that he can't use them, or that they're stupid—though he does wish so many of them weren't so brightly colored—can't a man stim with something a little easier on the eyes? no, it's just—what’s the point? he’s never had one before. never needed one. always done just fine with other stuff.(or, mick rory stimming through the years)





	stolen, unstolen

when mick rory is very young, he has toys. little soft ones, teddy bears, dinosaurs, and he runs his little hands over them when he's tired or thinking or bored.

then cars. he sets them up like race tracks, makes ramps and sends them flying down and sees which ones go farthest, which ones go fastest. and then when the contest’s done he spins their wheels watches them go round and round and round.

as he gets a bit older, there’s fewer toys, but he’s not fussed, really. plenty to do without them—flapping, rolling, rocking, head-banging, hair-twisting, bouncing, and sometimes several at once. and it’s good, it’s right—

but his pops doesn’t like it. he complains, grumbles, sometimes shouts when he sees mick in motion, he says—

 _quit_. says—

 _stop_ , says—

 _keep still_ , says—

 _cut that out you look fuckin_ —

so eventually mick learns. the only ways to move, to walk, to be are the ways pops moves-walks-is. so he watches.

sees that pops holds his arms down by his sides, and they swing a little—only a little. they don’t bend at the elbows, don’t press into his ribs. his wrists don’t hang loose, his hands don’t dangle. and they never wave through the air, or shake, or flap. and his fingers don’t wiggle.

so mick’s don’t either. he thinks his fingers will keep still easiest, when he first decides to make himself match—but they don’t. his arms go first, the biggest movement dropping quickest, which doesn’t make any sense to him but is how it turns out. they don’t swing through the air anymore, don’t flap up and down in big motions or small.

but his hands do. more than they ever have before, even, once he stops moving his arms. it’s like, he thinks, like all the movement has to go _somewhere_. like all the energy the feelings the humming has to go _somewhere_ , or he’ll. he doesn’t know. explode, maybe.

but whatever. it can’t go there. pops hates the handflapping more than he hates the arms, and the pacing, and every other twitchy thing mick does.

smacks them when he catches mick at it, sometimes. not every time, but sometimes.

despite this, it takes mick a very long time to stop handflapping entirely. he gets a lot of bruises. and, on one memorable occasion, a couple fractured fingers.

(it hurts to flap for a while after that, but it still doesn’t make him stop. it isn’t so easy to turn off as all that.)

but, eventually, he does stop. he gets happy and antsy and bored and a dozen other things and his hands are still still still.

but his fingers still wiggle, sometimes. when he’s thinking, mostly. or irritated—then they turn into claws. slowly moving claws, up and down like scales on the piano he’s never learned to play—fingers too clumsy, and never in the same place as the piano for long enough, since it isn’t theirs.

eventually, though, his fingers stop too. all of him stops. slows down goes still. doesn’t move in the old familiar ways.

but does still move, sometimes, in smaller motions, smaller ways. not flapping. not anymore. no open hands, wide movements for his mom to call fly-away arms. no, instead it’s short, jerky movements, hands closed, curled tight in fists, hitting against the sides of his legs, once, twice, three times—more, if no one else is around. but if someone is, he stops at three.

he works at stopping at two. one, when he can. but two, always, at least.

and there are other things, other motions other ways to move and get the energy _out_.

stomping, sometimes, if he's alone. knocking things over, if his pops isn’t in the room.

(grinding his teeth if he is. digging his nails deep into the palms of his hands when he curls them into fists. biting the inside of his cheek. biting his tongue. eating.)

and there are other ways—and other things to get out besides anger. he has different tricks for those.

and sometimes it’s not about getting anything out—sometimes it’s just that he has to move. and sometimes it’s not even that—sometimes there’s no actual reason and he just—can’t be still. can’t do it won’t do it.

sometimes he has to. and he can. he often does.

but sometimes—without thinking, sometimes, he’ll get twitchy in small ways.

-

he reflexively rubs the edge of his sleeve between thumb and forefinger. (this gets him called a sissy, once or twice, which is stupid because mick doesn’t do it cause he’s _scared_ —but he knows better than to tell pops that.)

taps his fingers against the side of his leg. (never the tabletop—pops always complains, and his teachers, when he has them, say he’s being distracting. he can’t see how—no one pays attention to him, and he’s careful to do it quietly, with his fingertips, not his nails, but whatever. they don’t care about that.)

shifts his weight from one leg to another. (never too often, because then it looks like rocking and _what are you crazy?_ and a knock upside the head. but occasional shifting never gets any comments.)

unfocuses his eyes, sometimes. (it makes him look stupid, but everyone thinks he’s stupid already anyway, and it’s kinda nice when everything goes hazy round the edges. so what the hell. might as well make everything softer once in a while, sandpaper down all the rough corners.) (in later years, he’ll switch from unfocused eyes to a couple beers and get a fifty-fifty chance of roughly the same effect.)

fiddles with pencils. (though he knows he probably shouldn’t—they end up flying right out of his fingers and across the room half the time, and then he gets in trouble for throwing things.) (they never listen when he says he didn’t mean to, so he gives up trying after the first few times and instead slaps a big grin on his face, makes a quip about how far it went, or who’s eye he’d been aiming for this time, and just sits the detention. beats hanging round the house anyway.)

chews on pens. (pops says it’s gross, his teachers say it’s gross, his mom says it’s bad for his teeth, but he doesn’t care. he chews on them anyway. it’s better than chewing on his shirts—they only get soggy and weirdly stretched and then he has to _feel_ that—and it makes everyone complain even more besides. so he sticks to pens.)

curls the corners of pages. (it makes librarians yell and teachers tut and the odd friend stop lending him books, but it also helps him focus as he reads, and he can’t exactly stop himself anyway, so he doesn’t care. keeps doing it.)

messes with hoodie zippers. (the up-down zip sound is nice, but it’s more the way it feels, the slight vibration and resistance, the opening and closing, that’s appealing. the up-down hand motion’s nice too. but when that’s too loud, too distracting, he just fiddles with the actual zipper bit, cause it’s small and metal and cool and nice, and they’ve usually got holes in the middle and that makes them more satisfying, and no one really notices, ever—and if they do he can either unzip or re-zip his jacket and they’ll think that was all he was doing in the first place. it’s perfect. they’re perfect. he loves zippers.)

-

he sticks with these things—and especially zippers—for a long, long time, near-exclusively, not counting the odd twitch or fidget he does on the side.

but then he steals a pack of his dad’s matches and lights one and watches the flame flicker and leap and dance and trail the faintest, shimmering stream of smoke when it dies and that’s it.

forget zippers—he doesn’t actually, not quite, but all the same—he’s found a new love.

fire.

constantly changing, ever-shifting, bright and colorful and warm—it’s fascinating. never the same twice. so he never tires of staring at it—or at the thin stream of smoke that dances ever upward when the flame finally dies out.

and it’s also fun to run his fingers just above it, get them wet and run them through it, quick, over and over, feel the flames lick them, just a bit, just slightly out of reach, for the thrill and the heat and—sometimes—the slight sting.

(he burns himself this way, a couple times, but never badly—and he quickly learns three separate ways to do it without getting hurt at all.)

he experiments, first with one match, then another, two at once, three, several—then pops’ lighter. then sets small fires. watches those. and again and again until one day—

well.

one day.

-

he still plays with the lighter, and even matches, after that, when he can get his hands on either. which is often. for all they get confiscated over and over, neither’s never very hard to find, or to take.

-

(once, though, in juvie, he isn’t able to get hold of anything for five straight weeks. damn near drives him up the wall. he gets in seven different fights—and mick doesn’t get in fights. he doesn’t usually have to. a look is enough, a threatening loom, the flash of a lighter—or a quick fist.)

(it doesn’t count as a fight if he never gets hit, if it’s over in seconds.)

(but he gets hit seven times in those five weeks, and the last time hit bad enough he winds up with bloody teeth, a lump on the back of his head, and a nurse waking him up every time he drifts off.)

(stupid.)

(he finds a pack of matches in his pocket the next day. eyes snart, cos even though he doesn’t say anything his handiwork is dead obvious. no one else can manage it without mick noticing.)

(and no one else would bother trying.)

-

it continues all through juvie, the little song and dance of shrinks confiscating matches and lighters and fuckin paperclips from him every twelve seconds, all the while pyschoanalyzing his every movement and arguing with each other about what exactly is _wrong_ with him.

-

they consider just about everything, over the years. anger issues, oppositional defiance, conduct disorder, pyromania, sociopathy, pyschopathy—lots of different words, all of them boiling down, in the end, to _trouble_. as in, _that mick kid’s_ trouble.

-

sometimes, when they’re feeling particularly generous, some of them say _troubled_.

-

and, sometimes, when they’re feeling particularly _enlightened_ , some—and by some he means _two_ , two whole shrinks out of fuckall-many, one with obnoxiously bright eyes and another with truly apalling brown-and-green pinstripe trousers—they point at his twitchiness, and the fire-setting, and the impulsiveness, and the anger, and the way he gets _so bored_ and goes thrill-seeking, and they say _hyperactive_. say it like it’s the goddamn holy grail, and they’re ever so clever for pinpointing its location.

he’s not a _monster_ , they say, he’s just adhd—and troubled. these two are so very fond of _troubled_.

(out of all the shrinks he’s had, he hates them the most.)

-

they suggest all these things and more, during all those years in juvie. but there are some things they never suggest.

like ptsd.

-

(mick doesn’t fault them this. actually, would’ve been more likely to fault them if they _had_ suggested it, cause—just—they might be right and they might be wrong about any of the other things they’ve said he has over the years—but they’d be dead wrong if they said he’s got ptsd. did they throw around the word _trauma_ after the fire? sure. and was he a little shell-shocked at the time? sure. but only for a little, and only the tiniest amount, and both their mutterings and his shock passed. so he hasn’t got ptsd. never has. and he knows it, cause well—that was pops, wasn’t it?)

(and he’s not like pops.)

(he’s nothing like pops.)

(except—)

-

another word they don’t toss around, in all those years—

autistic.

-

he snatches his own file, just once, and skims through it, and he doesn’t see autistic set down on paper anything likely baldly.

but he does find a note.

just one, from years back—years and years—about a suspected (and summarily dismissed) developmental delay.

which isn’t a surprise, exactly, once he looks up what it means—and pokes round the edges of research.

he’s always known, more or less, that he’s _something_. from the time he was pint-sized he’s known. it’s not like it was ever really a secret, the way people talked to him and about him—and it’s not like mick’s an idiot, no matter what they think and say. he can tell he’s not like anyone else.

and even all that aside—he knows they wondered, when he was small, if he might be _something_.

-

(halfway down the fourth bottle of the night and narrow eyed and looming, pops catches mick rocking back and forth on his feet—he hasn’t learned to plant himself like a mountain yet—and spits out not _delayed_ or _autistic_ or _disabled_ , but—the other word.

not that he needs the bottle to use it—he doesn’t. never has. never will. but it comes out just a little sharper with whiskey coating the syllables.

and it trails on the end of a new sentence, one pops hasn’t let slip before— _no wonder they think you’re goddamn—_

mick never finds out exactly who _they_ are. at the time, he assumes anyone. everyone. later, he assumes teachers. even later, he wonders if maybe pops took him to a doc—but only briefly before he dismisses that, too. no way he would’ve actually done it. never would’ve allowed anyone to consider in any capacity that mick might be—that _his kid_ might be—

nah. it never happened. pops must’ve refused, kicked up a fuss, got the suggestion dismissed, made it all go away—at least til mick saw the small, leftover note in his file.)

-

(not that mick pursues it, either. at least not officially.)

-

after poking the edges of research, that first afternoon-turned-to-three-days, he lets it sit for a good long while. absorbs it.

comes back to it later, reads a bit more. absorbs that, too. decides, yeah, that all tracks. he’s that. autistic. good to know.

and he lets it drop. knowing’s enough.

-

pays the shrinks even less mind than before after that, if that’s even possible, cause maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong but either way they’re stupid and it doesn’t _matter_.

-

what matters is this: mick’s a bunch of things, probably, and one of them’s autistic, and he likes that, and he’s damn sure he likes whatever the rest of them are, too, and he’s not gonna change them for anyone.

he’s done enough of that, and look where it got him: fractured fingers, bruised forearms, a lighter he can’t let go of without feeling like spores’ve set root in his lungs, burns all down his arms, and a posture and gait he’s stolen and can’t give back now if he tries.

fuck all that.

no more.

-

so what matters is this: mick is _mick_ , and everyone else can go hang.

-

so he keeps doing what he’s doing—with two exceptions.

as he gets older, he stops bothering with matches, switches almost exclusively to the lighter.

and he stops bothering with his old tricks—passing his fingers through flames unharmed. finds he likes the sting. (and, sometimes, the burn—though he doesn’t always leave marks. that’s for—well. that’s for sometimes.)

-

(he never does it where anyone can see. not because he cares what they think—he doesn’t—or because he thinks they’d think anything at all—they wouldn’t—but because it’s none of their goddamn business. what a man does with his own lighter isn’t anyone else’s concern. and because they’d only take his shit. again.)

-

(snart sees him, once. mick knows he does. snart doesn’t hide. doesn’t pretend it never happened, either. but he also doesn’t bother trying to stop him, and doesn’t bring it up. just chucks stupid ointments at him now and then.)

(mick doesn’t use them. they feel weird. slimy. fuckin gross. make his skin crawl, and sometimes burn worse than the flames—and that’s just from dipping his fingertips in out of idle, annoyed curiosity.)

(after a while, snart chucks different ones at him. less oily, more powdery. weird patches that mick assumes has stuff infused in the cotton, or whatever it is. he doesn’t use those either.)

(but he keeps them.)

-

(when snart dies, he throws them away.)

-

(but before all that—before snart’s sacrifice, before the waverider, hell, even before the guns—there is this.)

-

snart’s fingers tapping soundlessly on the edge of the table. his fingers twitching at his side. his thumb tracing the cut of the biggest ruby in their latest haul.

snart pacing idly, round and round in circles as he talks, as he theorizes, as he plots.

snart tossing things, catching them, tossing them, catching them, over and over and over.

snart playing the same song—classical, tchaikovsky, mick thinks, he did listen when snart talked about it—over and over for hours, maybe days as he tries to solve a particularly tricky puzzle in time for a finnicky heist.

snart flipping pencils through his fingers over and over and over, so quick they blur, with the kind of fluid dexterity mick’s never quite been able to master (though not, when he was young, for lack of trying—at least half the pencils he’d flung across classrooms had been because he’d been trying to master it, the way his classmates had so easily).

snart tapping a rhythm on his leg idly, briefly, from time to time—and always the same one.

snart, for all his steady calm, every inch as twitchy as mick has always been. just better at hiding it.

-

and there is this:

mick’s butterfingers dropping fork after fork after fork, snart occasionally whirling around for something else and letting a pen or a lockpick or a knife slip out from under his fingers, and both of them stiff, teeth-gritted, for a tense seven seconds afterward no matter who’s dropped what.

objects falling to hardwood floors in the early hours of the morning, outlawed.

snart’s head snapping up and then down when mick slips in the door at night and slams it behind him. mick stomping up the walk and closing the door and locking it.

mick freezing over his book when snart wrenches the fridge open. snart tapping twice before opening the fridge.

mick turning the sound up on a pre-recorded game when snart starts muttering at five in the morning when he’s crashed on the couch. getting up. making popcorn, not bothering to open the stupid thing before the beeper goes off. refusing to share when snart inevitably wakes and makes a face at him.

mick waking up with tangled sheets, killer headaches, no memory of his dreams, every light in the room blaring at once and the blinds wide open though they’d been decidedly closed and all the lights off when he’d gone to sleep. heading to the kitchen to find snart grinning.

(“rise and shine,” he always says, even when it’s three in the morning. especially when it’s three in the morning.)

snart never, not once, doing anything stupid like trying to hug him. mick never so much as waving.

-

and there is also this:

mick’s own fingers tapping on the edge of a counter, though they haven’t in years. turning a ruby in bumbling circles. tossing knives. wiggling at his sides.

quietly. unobtrusively.

he doesn’t even notice, really, that he’s gotten twitchy again—not until one day he’s waiting for snart to make it to their getaway car, two minutes late, now three, now four and five and six and ten and he finds himself tapping out that same rhythm on the steering wheel and when did that happen and where’s snart.

finally, at last, twelve minutes late rounding the corner into the alley into the car snapping _drive_.

and mick drives and his fingers don’t stop tapping til he has to grip the steering wheel tight to make a sharp turn to cut them off to—

and then they’ve lost the tail and they’re safe and his fingers are still again and he’s pretty sure—

he’s pretty sure—

he loses the thought in the rush.

-

and then they get the guns.

-

snart tells mick to take his gun apart and put it back together, find out how it works, memorize it.

so he does. over and over, til it becomes its own familiar rhythm. does it a few extra times after he’s memorized it, just cause.

keeps doing it, off and on, from time to time. sometimes to clean it. sometimes for maintenance. but mostly—mostly just cause.

it’s nice. taking things apart, fitting them back together, feeling them click, seeing them come to life in his hands. it’s good.

(and snart does it too, he knows. sure, he says it’s maintenance, says its cleaning and improvements and keeping his memory fresh—but mick’s not stupid. he can see _just cause_ a mile away, in the set of snart’s shoulders, in the length of his gaze, the stretch of the drawl when he speaks.

it’s not the same as his _just cause_ , of course. not just for the reasons but for the way snart does it—over and over and methodical, but rarely the exact same way twice. where mick keeps things ordered, snart experiments. changes things up. sees _will this work if i attach it after this_ and _what happens if i add this part_ and _if i increase this input how will it change the output_ and dozens of other things, over time. has to, or he gets bored.

mick never gets bored.)

-

mick fiddles with the trigger methodically. shifts in place once, plants himself like a tree, fiddles again. and then sets a building on fire and watches it burn.

after all this time, it’s still fascinating.

snart tugs him away too soon, but mick lets him. they’ve got places to go, people to see. money to spend.

-

mick finds himself rocking, once, as snart outlines a plan.

stops. then hates that he stopped, but it feels too weird to start again. too forced. and forcing things is just as bad, is still pretending to be something he’s not—and he decided a long time ago he’s not going to do that. not ever.

-

the next time he finds himself rocking, just slightly, side-to-side, when it’s just him and snart, he doesn’t stop. doesn’t make the motion any bigger, but doesn’t stop.

-

and then the englishman happens. the waverider happens.

and he goes on board with snart because snart says they can steal shit from the past and mick’s never one to turn down a score and he’s not about to let snart go alone, anyway. and as an added bonus, it’s a real-life sci-fi adventure, so what the hell.

so he goes.

-

he regrets it.

long before snart betrays him—long before he tosses him off the ship like last month’s rotting trash and leaves him to die—long before the time masters pick him up and—long before all that, mick regrets it.

the waverider crew isn’t made up of legends. it’s not even made up of heroes. what it’s made up of, he discovers, very early, is goddamn assholes.

he’s not surprised—anyone who slaps the name hero on their chest like it’s stone-cold fact tends to be an asshole, in one way or another, and not just because so many of them—not just red, he’s met dozens of cop bastards who think of themselves the same way—like socking him across the face and shooting people point-blank. it’s cause they’re always sanctimonious bastards, the lot of them.

and the waverider crew’s no different.

-

right from the start, they mutter about him.

oh, mick’s a murderer, oh, mick’s a brute, oh, mick’s violent and thuggish and evil and Not Like Us what if he attacks us, blah blah blah.

whatever.

and then they add, oh, mick’s an idiot, oh, mick’s a moron, oh, he’s bone-dead stupid i don’t even think he can _read_.

whatever.

and then the professor walks in on him with messing with his lighter, freezes, and shuffles out like he’s worried mick’s gonna somehow set him on fire from across the room without any accelerants—and after that there’s comments about how mick’s not right in the head. well. more of them. there’s been some already, of course, hand-in-hand with _he’s a murderer_ and _he’s moron_.

whatever.

nothing new.

-

blondie tells him to stop tapping his knife on the table. the professor cuts in that it’s unsanitary. snart rolls his eyes at them.

mick taps louder for five full seconds and then drives the knife into the gap between the metal band around the table and the table itself.

-

(mick sees the way her hands tighten around her batons, sometimes, forming fists—then relax then form fists again then relax, over and over and over, even when there’s no imminent battle, sees that it happens more when there’ve been sudden movements or sudden sounds, even tiny ones, like twigs snapping, and most of all when they’re out in downpours—and he says nothing.)

-

the professor tells snart to tell him to stop running his hands over the artifacts. “he’ll break something, or worse—”

“he won’t break anything.”

“—and what about fingerprints?”

“we know all about fingerprints.” snart grins.

mick doesn’t join in the banter. doesn’t make any effort to keep his hands to himself either. had barely touched anything—you reach out and brush _one_ smooth rock, and suddenly you’re trying to break the timeline, as though that’s _actually_ how it works.

(and they say _he’s_ the idiot.)

-

(mick sees the way the professor paces when he thinks, faster the tenser the situation gets, the more he starts muttering in worry, hands and fingers twitch-twitch-twitching all the while, sees the way his fingers don’t keep perfectly still unless he jams a marker in them and the way he always keeps a marker within reach—and he says nothing.)

-

haircut tells him to stop fiddling with the trigger of his gun. “what if you accidentally—?”

“relax,” snart says, at the same time mick growls, “wouldn’t be no accident.”

-

(mick sees the way haircut shifts his weight when things go wrong, the way he half-shakes his fists when something goes right, the way he drums his fingers on tabletops when he’s thinking, the way he whirls in midair in his suit just for kicks, the way he trails his hands over absolutely everything—and he says nothing.)

-

the next time haircut complains, snart gives mick a look. not a commiserating one. a, _please, just this once to shut him up_ one.

mick considers it for half a beat, because it’s snart, and then dismisses it and keeps fiddling. it won’t hurt anybody. not unless he wants it to.

-

(mick feels, more than sees, the wry _what-can-you-do_ look snart gives haircut a minute later. remembers polished rubies and twitching fingers and familiar, stolen-unstolen rhythms—hears the slight crunch of leaves underfoot as snart shifts fractionally, as ray does too, as they both do a second time and a third and he’s the only one perfectly, blessedly still, except for his finger sliding soundless over the trigger.

now who’s the ones gonna get them caught?)

-

jax tells him to stop flicking the lighter on and off. it’s distracting, he says. gonna get them spotted, he says.

“i’m afraid he’s got a point, mick,” snart says.

-

(mick sees the way jax always has something in his hands, a wrench or a book or a phone, the way he walks places just to walk, except when he runs, the way he fiddles with forks til they blur, the way his leg bounces when he sits—and he says nothing.)

(he hears the edge in snart’s voice, either apologetic or relieved and maybe neither but probably both. wonders, for the first time, if maybe it distracts snart, too.)

-

chicken tells him he’s not as threatening as he thinks he is.

mick, who’s been hitting his fist against the side of his leg rhythmically for the last three minutes to drown out the scuffle of half a dozen sets of footsteps and the drone of the waverider and not at all to be threatening, ignores him, and slams his fist against his leg harder.

he can practically feel the apologetic _he gets like this sometimes_ look snart shoots him from over mick’s shoulder. it’s louder than the goddamn lights.

-

(mick sees the way chicken is always still, never fidgets, never shifts, never paces, just stands, like a goddamn statue, and wants very much to say something—sees the way his stupid eyes don’t match the rest of him, sliding slow and even across rooms, darting to doors as they open and cabinets as they close and people as they reach out to shake hands, sees the way he never faces walls, and he thinks of illegal forks, of overloud football games, of three lamps burning at once and an impossible electric bill—and he says nothing.)

-

english tells snart to tell him to pay attention, tells snart to make sure mick doesn’t do anything _stupid_ , doesn’t go off the rails.

and snart says not _he’s right here, tell him yourself_ or _he won’t_ or _you can trust him_ or even _i trust him_ , but _i will_.

just, _i will_.

mick stalks off.

-

(mick sees the way english looks at everyone, when he thinks no one’s looking—the way he looks at snart, the way he looks at mick—sees the way snart doesn’t see it, can’t, won’t—and he walks even faster.)

-

mick stares into the little flame, passing his fingers over it again and again, and sometimes through it, his back to the wall and his eyes unfocused.

footsteps. he doesn’t bother looking up. grunts a hello.

“put that away,” snart says. “we’ve got work to do.”

-

(mick sees the way snart looks at english, at the rest of the crew, at mick—and he grunts again. nothing left to say.)

-

and then snart leaves him like so much trash.

-

and then the time masters come.

-

and then they do Things and—

then he’s chronos and he does Things and—

-

then there’s snart again, and now he’s back in with the sanctimonious bastards, and—

-

then snart’s dead.

-

mick sits at the table and eats. it doesn’t taste like nothing, it’s not turned to sand or ash or what-the-fuck-ever in his mouth, no poetic bullshit like that. it tastes like food. good food, even.

but it’s like a sandwich when he’s been samefooding pudding.

not that he’s _actually_ been samefooding pudding. hasn’t done that since he was goddamn eight years old. but it’s the same as it was then, pops slapping a sandwich on his plate and demanding he eat it, tomatoes and soggy bread and all—just without his mom slipping him a pudding cup after he’d finished and pops’d gone out again.

instead it’s all...sandwiches.

(he’s tempted to get a pudding cup for old time’s sake, but he’s pretty sure it’d just taste like a goddamn metaphorical sandwich.)

but whatever. he’s not eight anymore, and a meal’s a meal, and he’s gonna eat it.

and he does.

eats the stupid thing and leaves his dishes there because fuck if he’s gonna wash them, that’s what the ship’s for, and he didn’t even touch the silverware anyway.

-

he gets reacquainted with his lighter (not that he was ever unacquainted). throws out the stupid boxes snart kept chucking at him.

-

time passes.

-

mick decides to clean the heat gun and takes it apart in his room and leaves it there for several hours because putting it all back together is suddenly so much effort.

but the thought of the crew wandering round the ship, maybe just out in the hall, maybe coming up to the door, maybe barging _inside_ with the gun gutted like this makes the skin between his shoulderblades crawl so much he hauls himself upright and pieces it back together in fits and starts.

-

takes it apart again, puts it back together again. and again. and again til the motion’s fluid and the clicks set right and the damn thing works like it’s supposed to and the mites between his shoulderblades quit multiplying.

-

takes his gun to the library and cleans it there—because he hasn’t, so far, actually cleaned it. just gone through the motions. and it’s about time.

lays out all the pieces. polishes them one by one.

doesn’t bother looking up when haircut walks in as he’s piecing it back together. doesn’t bother answering when he asks if it’s safe. just keeps moving, click this, attach that, slide that, secure the wires here…

haircut watches a while, then leaves. mick hardly notices.

-

time passes.

-

he walks through the ship and taps the side of his leg idly. when he recognizes the rhythm, he stops. and then wishes he hadn’t.

the next three times he catches himself tapping, he stops.

the fourth time, he doesn’t.

-

he gives haircut the cold gun. tells him to take it apart. learn it.

but the asshole puts it back together wrong and mick feels his mouth zip shut.

-

later, when he has the cold gun again, he goes to store it. stops.

takes it apart and puts it back the way it should be, which takes longer than he expects—how many times has he seem snart disassemble and reassemble it? how many dozens?

but then, he never did put it back the same way more than a few times. so it’s understandable, mick thinks, that he can’t remember right off exactly how it goes. understandable, even if it’s wrong.

-

time passes. even more of it.

-

the team still thinks he’s an idiot.

the fake snart thinks he is, too. then the real snart. then the team again.

and he’d say whatever cause it is whatever, it’s always been whatever, but he went back to the time masters for them he was ready to die for them he let _snart_ die for them and he stuck around and he faced off with clowns and still, and still—

they think he’s an idiot.

but he knows it and he keeps coming back anyway, so maybe they’re not entirely wrong.

-

he grips a pole reflexively, back-to-back with the captain, flexing and relaxing his fingers in a pattern that shouldn’t feel familiar but does, and he’s just decided he likes it, ten seconds after the goons are all toast, when he whirls round to give the captain a once-over and his eyes fall to her hands and he discovers _oh_. he’s stolen it.

he didn’t know he could still steal things like that. isn’t sure what to make of the discovery, so he puts it out of mind.

-

until he’s sitting across from wally and notes vaguely that wally’s knee is bouncing at superspeed and finds, a few minutes later, that his own’s started following suit, just slower.

he quits, cause it feels weird, copying wally, he barely knows him—and then he remembers jax had done it, too, and snart, once or twice, once upon a time, and it’s possible he’s stealing from three people at once.

 _what a feat_ , he thinks dryly, and gets up to go.

-

he swipes a particularly enticing pair of earrings and slips them in his pocket and turns to grin at haircut and before he knows it he’s shaking his fists at him, pleased as hell—both of them, double, in a short quick motion that’s over as quick as it begins and isn’t anything like old men on saturday morning cartoons yelling at kids to get off their lawns, and is instead everything like the way haircut celebrates when he solves a particularly tricky equation, or blasts someone out of the sky with what he _insists_ , half the time, on calling pizzazz. (mick swears he uses the word just to bug him.)

and like, he thinks, though he can’t be sure, can’t quite remember, it’s all a bit vague and muddled and loud, but he _thinks_ —like himself, a bit. when he’d been younger. much younger. pint-sized. runty.

and twitchy.

he keeps the grin plastered on his face, jams a hand in his pocket and runs his fingers over the earrings, half-careful to keep from stabbing himself and half-wishing he would because that...happened. and haircut’s looking at him a little funny and he knows why but not _why_ , or maybe not _how_ , and fuck that, he's not puzzling that out.

so he heads off, and he paces a bit and reminds himself so much of the professor he's seized with the abrupt desire to strangle a puppet (and then leo for giving him that particular association).

-

he doesn't do the shake-fist thing again for a while, but when he does—after a thrilling chase and capture—it's in front of ray again, and he still gets a weird look, but it's replaced pretty quickly by a stupid beaming-sunshine smile as ray follows suit.

-

he notices, some days later, one ray palmer uncharacteristically picking at the hem of his shirt, then rubbing it between his fingers as he talks.

notices also, days after that, ray tapping on a tabletop in his lab—in itself nothing unusual, except the beat is snart’s beat, where ray usually prefers no consistent one at all.

wants, abruptly, to ask him to stop—it's not his to steal. walks out without a word instead.

-

he's in the kitchen reading and captain lance walks in and taps on the fridge once before she opens it.

he blinks. wonders if it's coincidence. and if not, how long she’s been doing it, and why. if she knows, maybe. somehow.

but she can't.

except he pays attention now and she always does it, so—

he elects not to think about it.

-

types more on his latest novel, as much for the click of the keys beneath his fingers as for the satisfaction of watching letters crawl across the page, the story come as much to life as he can make it, and when he slips into the kitchen after hours of point-and-peck zari asks if he’s been writing, and can she see.

and when, weeks later, he lets her see the third draft of that section, the corners come back soft and curled and he wonders if she's always done it, or if she’s stealing from him, too.

he's been pretty sure she’s neurotypical—yeah, the ptsd, sure, but disability-wise, he means, neurotypical—and he’s usually a pretty damn good judge, but even he misses folks sometimes. hell, he missed _haircut_ of all people for _weeks_. so maybe she's not, fuck if he knows. probably isn't. it's not like the waverider’s exactly known for picking up neurotypicals anyway...

-

he wakes up one night, in his bed on the waverider, the front of his shirt soaked with sweat and his room brighter than the nine hells and before he can think—

“snart?”

but no. stupid. he’s dead—long dead. mick’s alone. so this is—something else. systems malfunction, wake-up summons, some other bullshit, he doesn't know.

he squints, stands. “what’samatter?”

“nothing, mr. rory.”

...nothing? “then—” he gropes for words. “turn the damn lights off.”

“of course, mr. rory.”

and the lights dim slowly and then switch off, and mick wonders who turned them all on in the first place. has a sneaking suspicion it was gideon, acting all by herself.

he isn't strictly sure she's exactly supposed to, but knows she can—has before, like with zari and that—thing. fake not-fake groundhog day thing.

but he can't figure _why_ she's done this, if she has. gideon doesn't play pranks.

...except there _was_ the fake not-fake groundhog day thing, so maybe she does. maybe that's all this is.

maybe.

mick puts it out of mind, leaves the room and wanders a while, one hand trailing along the walls.

-

ray looks like a goddamned drowned duck in the jacket mick reluctantly loans him after he manages to fall in the goddamned ocean, and mick tells him so.

ray laughs, so hoarse he _sounds_ like one too. all the saltwater, probably.

but whatever. he'll live, mick’s pretty sure.

ray looks less sure, unsteady grin and darting eyes and fingers fumbling with the jacket’s zipper—not trying to pull it up, though he probably should, in this wind, when he's that soggy—just fumbling.

and his grin steadies and his eyes pick a goddamn spot and stop making mick more seasick than the goddamn boat.

unfortunately the spot they pick is mick, and it's one thing to track someone's gaze when they're looking other places but it's another to keep it up when they're staring right back at you, but fuck if mick is gonna look away _immediately_. haircut’d only take it weird.

so he raises his eyebrows—what—and then he looks away and finds himself reaching for—but of course there's no zipper. haircut's got the jacket.

he settles for messing with the hem of his shirt instead, and pretends he doesn't notice that it turns to picking after a while, because of course it does. a thief is a thief is a thief, in all things always.

and echopraxia’s a bitch.

-

and then he's paired with nate on a mission and nate for all his squirrely tendencies doesn't body stim at all so mick thinks he's safe from—all that. for once.

but nate brings along his fidget spinner, and he uses it once or twice, idly, in quieter moments between action and goon-fighting. and for all most of them look stupid—bright, eye-gouging colors, cartoon patterns, tacky plastic—this one looks not-terrible. simple, black, metallic—and quiet, for once. it doesn't scrape and whir like the ones mick’s seen around, and it doesn't stick and stutter, either, and abruptly mick wants to try it.

so he does, the next time nate sets it down and forgets about it and leaves the room—which he does often enough mick knows roughly how long it'll be, at minimum, til he comes back for it—just once.

it's heavier than he expects. spins faster. reminds him, a bit, of watching ceiling fans go round as a kid, of staring with eyes not quite focused, the blades slowly blurring together like a CD, and then trying to see the thing spin both directions.

it's...nice. hard to manipulate with one hand—he doesn't know how nate does it—but nice.

he puts it back well before nate returns looking for it, grinning sheepishly and making a quip about what if he'd left _that_ in 1842.

mick grunts. they move on.

-

after the mission, he finds he wants to try it again. doesn't, cause ever since nearly losing the thing in the 1800s pretty’s fallen into a habit of sticking it in the same pocket whenever he's done with it, and while mick _can_ just lift it it doesn't seem worth the hassle. it's not like he’ll be able to spin the thing one-handed any better a second time, and what's the point of a stim if you can't do it one-handed?

so he doesn't bother. but he does catch himself staring, a time or two, as nate uses it.

nate catches him too, the second time. raises an eyebrow, holds out the spinner. “you ever try one of these?”

“once,” mick offers, with the ghost of a grin, cause contrary to popular belief he does appreciate irony.

“you like it?”

he grunts. hopes it comes off as ambivalence and not an affirmative. then, grudgingly, to make sure, “took two hands.”

“ah. inconvenient?”

“mm.”

“i have some other stuff that's better for one-handed,” nate says. “i could show you?”

“i'll pass.” he doesn't need anyone's damned charity.

-

mick wanders into the kitchen to find pretty and haircut huddled across from each other, heads bent over a basket of something metallic, muttering excitedly to each other in overlapping voices he can't be bothered to puzzle out—something about the science gadgets, probably, that ray’s bound to be explaining with more math than words (and why a historian should understand so much of that nonsense mick doesn't know, but there nate is anyway, like the library of alexandria and a calculator had a baby).

he ignores them, goes to get food. is about to grab a bowl when ray calls, “hey mick! come look at this.”

“pass,” he says, taking a plastic bowl and setting it on the counter. “don't care about your nerd shit.”

“it's not—just come look!”

mick waits til there's cereal in the bowl and a spoon in his hand and then walks over.

and haircut’s right. it's not nerd shit. no gadgets in sight. instead, it's a basket of stim toys—loads of them, all different colors but several silver and black, and all different kinds.

he looks up at them, nonplussed, and ray wiggles a capless container, grinning.

“courtesy of nate!”

“gideon, actually,” nate cuts in. “and the fabricator. all i did was input the requests.”

“right. anyway, look—” ray says, and pulls something bright green out of the container and stretches it. slime.

“...okay.”

“here—” ray holds it out.

mick sets his cereal down and shakes his head. he'd rather eat his own socks than touch that. it looks wet, and it squelches between ray’s fingers. “pass.”

ray looks momentarily like mick’s kicked his favorite puppy, then shrugs. “suit yourself.”

so he does. eats his cereal before it can go soggy, occasionally watching the others—and the basket—out of the corner of his eye.

it isn't, mick thinks, that he doesn't like stim toys, or that he can't use them, or that they're stupid—though he does wish so many of them weren't so brightly colored—can't a man stim with something a little easier on the eyes? no, it's just—what’s the point? he’s never had one before. never needed one. always done just fine with other stuff.

ordinary toys, his clothes, his tools, himself—always himself. so there's just—not been a need. still isn't one.

...but there's a basket at the table and he's turning his spoon over and over in his hands because they're suddenly very, very twitchy.

too twitchy.

and all he can think of is aching fingers and roaring fire and a roaring in his ears and a crisp file and illegal forks and a familiar rhythm twice-stolen and a fidget spinner in the palm of his hand, heavy and smooth and blessedly silent and—

“gimme that.”

ray blinks, and one of nate’s eyebrows lifts, and they both grin stupid knowing grins as they push the basket over and mick ignores them and shuffles through it.

couple more little tubes of slime. couple fidget spinners. fucking tangles, in primary colors—pass. a little tin of purple putty he pokes dubiously—and it's dry. a little sticky, but dry.

he pokes at it a little more, wraps it round his fingers, admires the weight—peels it off, squishes it back in the tin, closes it, keeps rummaging.

finds weird rubbery necklaces he hasn't seen before. probably for biting. beaded bracelets, lanyards, that he rolls between his fingers. clicky pens. figdet cubes. weird complicated things with several movable parts and odd shapes that he doesn't recognize and suspects might be from the future—or else invented with help from ray and gideon.

a zipper bracelet, black, that he toys with a long moment before moving on. he's not exactly a bracelet guy, not unless they’re strung with plenty of gems. or gold. gold’s always good.

he finds weird sequin things, about half the size of his palm. scented necklaces he tosses at ray. guy’d probably marry a candle, should fall all over himself for those. probably already has, mick realizes, since he's already looked through the basket, so mick's not shown him anything new--but too late, the necklaces’ve already hit him in the face.

finds weird bendy necklaces that're scratchy on his fingers, prickly marble-size things, actual marbles, a smooth rock—and a small ball thing, dark gray. squishy. soft.

he picks the last up, squashes it in one hand. it's like play-doh. except a ball. and there's weird air in it.

switches hands, squashes it more, til he doesn't notice the air bubble anymore, tosses it a couple times, catches it. squishes it again, and is about to see what happens if he stretches it when—

“it bounces, too.”

he blinks. pretty’s grinning at him, one hand in the basket which—is right in front of him and ray now, when did it get moved?

not important.

mick drops the ball on the table, dubiously. it does bounce, a little. huh.

good.

he bounces it a couple more times, stretches it, then goes back to squishing.

pretty, he decides, after a few more moments, is not getting this one back. this is his now.

“awesome, isn't it?” haircut grins. “tried it earlier, i love it.”

“no use hinting. pretty sure you'll have to pry it from his cold dead hands.”

mick glares, as ray splutters _i wasn't hinting, i was just—_

but nate—who catches mick’s eye as he assures ray that he knows—doesn't seem ruffled.

he also doesn't seem to be laughing, or infuriatingly knowing—well. not much, on the second point. but that's par for the course with nate, at least so far as stimming is concerned.

which, mick supposes, is alright. halfway earned, even—no one else's picked up him doing it, really, except for snart. but also it's not like he’s been trying to hide it, so nate shouldn't think he's _that_ clever.

but whatever. the point is he doesn't seem to be laughing at mick, and neither does ray, which is—new.

or maybe not new, exactly. but if feels like it, sort of, kind of, a whole lot—and he isn't sure what to do with that.

decides nothing.

switches the ball to his other hand. moves it back and forth, from one to the other.

“goes for you too, you know,” he mutters.

“what?”

mick doesn't bother repeating himself. nate’ll understand in a second. and sure enough—

“oh. what does?”

“havin to pry this thing outta my cold dead hands.”

“oh.” nate laughs. “yeah, i figured.” he waves a hand as though to say _whatever_. “it's yours, man.”

mick frowns. he'd been going to steal it anyway. he wonders if nate knows that. suspects he does. wonders what to make of the permission in light of that—whether he would've given it if he hadn’t known, or whether this is just a _might_ _as_ _well_.

shoves it out of mind. who cares.

squishes the ball a little while longer, then stands, abandoning his bowl, ignoring haircut’s objections and _what about the chore chart_ s, and leaves.

-

the squash ball travels in his pocket from then on, at least most days, usually in a little ziplock bag so it doesn't get crumbs and shit stuck to it—its only downside, he's discovered.

he keeps it there during missions, occasionally squishes it in the bag in his pocket. and it's good. nice. soft and familiar and solid.

(grounding, or whatever. the word tastes bad in his mouth, too much like shrink-speak, but he knows it's the right one, so he uses it occasionally—but only in his head.)

he takes it out from time to time, on the waverider, and messes with it. apart from the initial confused glance from wally—which he ignores—no one ever looks twice. he supposes they've gotten used to him doing weird shit, finally. run out of lines to crack.

unless they're making them behind his back still, which, being frank, he doesn't put past them.

but if they are, he never overhears it.

so he puts the suspicion in a corner, keeps doing what he's doing.

-

ray invents new stim toys, starts using them. eventually gets his own squish ball, too, but doesn't make that—is gifted it, courtesy of nate and gideon and fabricator. which prompts mick to wonder again exactly how stolen his own is.

-

he never quite gets an answer, because he never asks. so it feels, always, stolen and not, given and not, both at once, like the dead-alive cat in the box.

schrodinger’s stolen.

it feels that way, stolen-unstolen, until the day it finally breaks, after three solid months of being careful and taking it to the fabricator for repairs.

he stares at the mess, the rip, the weird foam-not foam stuff spilling out, and wants to punch a wall. doesn't.

throws the thing away and thumps his leg instead.

-

he heads to the fabricator, set on making a new one—finds nate already there and great, now he has to wait, and that wasn't part of the plan and he wants to punch a wall even _more_ now and—

nate turns around. “hey! i was just about to go looking for you!”

what.

then, _great, what's he want_.

then nate’s tossing something at him and he fumbles and nearly drops it but magically miraculously doesn't and—

it's…his squash ball. fixed, somehow, impossibly?

“got you a new one.”

“...why.”

“saw the old one got busted.”

“could've done it myself.”

“well yeah,” nate says. “but gifts are better.”

and he leaves and mick’s left frowning after him holding a ball that's undeniably not stolen, even if the original maybe was. and maybe wasn't.

he jams it in his pocket and turns to go.

turns back.

has the fabricator make a pen he's seen online with lots of fidgety bits. then, on impulse, a red and blue zipper bracelet. then a pocketknife, flippable, and a bracelet, burnished gold, with rollable beads. then a multitool with ridges, one of the tools being a concealed knife, and a rubber ball in obnoxious yellow. then gathers them all up, jams them in his pockets, and leaves.

-

he slips them to people over the next couple weeks, quietly.

the pen left beside one of nate’s dustier books. the zipper bracelet in ray’s lab. the pocketknife stabbed in the gap between captain's door and the wall, like the table years ago now, because he's goddamn hilarious. the rollable bracelet in the kitchen where amaya will find it and either like it or leave it (he's not really seen her stim before, but it'd feel weird to leave her out, so). the multitool in zari’s toolkit. the stupid bouncy ball right in wally’s pocket, just to prove he can steal from a speedster and get away with it if he wants. (not that he has a burning desire, really—he doesn't—but it's nice to know he can, if only barely and only cause wally was so distracted.)

really, this whole exercise’s proved he can steal from _everyone_ and get away with it, provided whatever he takes is small enough they won't notice it's gone—just like, once they find the small stim stuff, they don't seem to notice it's new. painfully unobservant, the lot of them, especially for self-proclaimed geniuses.

(except the captain, who flashes the pocketknife at breakfast and raises a questioning eyebrow at him. but she lets it drop when he shrugs, so whatever. and anyway, he knows he could've gotten away with it if he'd been more subtle—but what would’ve been the fun of that?)

they just accept that they’ve picked the stuff up somewhere and just forgotten, or that they're just things, or gideon put them there, and they start using them all, their unstolen things.

it is, he thinks, a job well-done. snart would approve.

(course, snart might also have thrown some of the stupid things right at people, instead of making it a heist—but what would've been the fun of that, either?)

-

they use the stolen things too, still. tapped fridges, familiar rhythms, zipper fixations, curled pages—use them so much they start to look right, sound right, seem unstolen, even though they aren't.

which, he supposes, makes a kind of sense—the squash ball still seems stolen, though it isn't.

some things are just like that.

(most things, nowadays.)

-

squash balls. timeships. teams. pacing feet, shaken fists, tapped rhythms. postures and gaits.

and a dozen other things, stolen, unstolen, both, neither, schrodinger’s _fuck_ - _you_.

but whatever.

they're his now, and in any case it's not like he's ever given a haul _back_.

why start now?

-

weeks later, mid-crisis, he tosses the ball at haircut. guy looks about ready to fly out of his skin, can probably use something to do.

guy fumbles it, picks it up. frowns at it, brow furrowed, then squashes it til he's pacing slower and not wild-eyed and not—whatever the hell else. solves half the crisis on the spot, breathes like a normal person and not a dying duck.

then tosses it back with a smile and a thanks, and mick catches it easily, for once, and they go and they solve the other half of the crisis and fight goons and mick blasts half of them in the face before they can reach the others and then they win and head back to the waverider and it's a helluva time, and it's _nice_ , it's good, its right, it's not schrodinger’s anything, it just—is.

just is.

-

thinking about it all over again in his room, hours later, jokes and laughter and badass lines and roaring fire all still in his ears, he grins, and flaps his hands.

helluva time.


End file.
